by man's labour in the world this
sound of a great shipbuilding yard is the most painful. Only the
harshest materials and the harshest actions are engaged in producing it:
iron struck upon iron, or steel smitten upon steel, or steel upon iron,
or iron upon steel--that and nothing else, day in, day out, year in and
year out, a million times a minute. It is an endless, continuous
birth-agony, that should herald the appearance of some giant soul. And
great indeed should be the overture to such an agony; for it is here
that of fire and steel, and the sweat and pain of millions of hours of
strong men's labour, were born those two giant children that were
destined by man finally to conquer the sea.

In this awful womb the _Titanic_ took shape. For months and months in
that monstrous iron enclosure there was nothing that had the faintest
likeness to a ship; only something that might have been the iron
scaffolding for the naves of half-a-dozen cathedrals laid end to end.
Far away, furnaces were smelting thousands and thousands of tons of raw
material that finally came to this place in the form of great girders
and vast lumps of metal, huge framings, hundreds of miles of stays and
rods and straps of steel, thousands of plates, not one of which twenty
men could lift unaided; millions of rivets and bolts--all the heaviest
and most sinkable things in the world. And still nothing in the shape
of a ship that could float upon the sea. The seasons followed each
other, the sun rose now behind the heights of Carrickfergus and now
behind the Copeland Islands; daily the ships came in from fighting with
the boisterous seas, and the two gray horses cantered beside them as
they slid between the islands; daily the endless uproar went on, and the
tangle of metal beneath the cathedral scaffolding grew denser. A great
road of steel, nearly a quarter of a mile long, was laid at last--a road
so heavy and so enduring that it might have been built for the triumphal
progress of some giant railway train. Men said that this roadway was the
keel of a ship; but you could not look at it and believe them.

The scaffolding grew higher; and as it grew the iron branches multiplied
and grew with it, higher and higher towards the sky, until it seemed as
though man were rearing a temple which would express all he knew of
grandeur and sublimity, and all he knew of solidity and
permanence--something that should endure there, rooted to the soil of
Queen's Island fo